Communication networks and the number of users exchanging and transferring data across such networks continue to increase. Specifically, with the advent of the Internet, e-business transactions have caused the exchange and/or transfer of users' personal and/or financial information. Currently, there are little assurances that a user and/or a business attempting to consummate an e-business transaction with a given web site is communicating with the server(s) associated with this web site. In particular, Internet Protocol (IP) snooping is becoming more rampant such that a given computer platform can pretend to be associated with a web site, thereby deceiving users (attempting to perform an e-business transaction with this web site) into disclosing personal and/or financial information.
In order to increase the security and trust associated with communications to a given computer platform/server, the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance (TCPA) has been formed. The TPCA describe in the TCPA Main Specification, Version 1.1a, 1 Dec. 2001 a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) or physical token that provides increased confidence and that enables enhancements of existing services and new services. The TPM supports auditing and logging of software processes, platform boot integrity, file integrity, and software licensing. The TPM provides a protected information store for the platform that can be used to attest to the identity of the platform as defined by the hardware that is present (e.g. processors, chipsets, firmware, etc.). These features encourage third parties to grant the platform access to information that would otherwise be denied.
While providing a level of relief for these security and trust issues for a given computer platform, the standards introduced by TCPA are limited to their applications. In particular, because of the increase in the number of users of the Internet, a given web site is required to include a number of computer platforms/servers to handle the load demands for an individual web site, thereby complicating the ability to provide secured communications due to the dynamic selection of these platforms/servers during such communications.